Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Startup Challenge: Twine, founded by Wharton MBA students Joseph Quan and Nikhil Srivastava (both WG’17). The Showcase took place on April 28 on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Twine makes internal mobility within a company seamless by recommending the best employees to fill open roles, helping companies to boost retention and significantly reduce hiring costs by efficiently hiring from within.

elevator pitch: For the modern consumer who wants to cook more and experiment with new recipes, Pinch is a revolutionary in-store machine that lets you buy the exact amount of fresh and organic spices, herbs, and seasonings that you need for your next meal.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
Co-founders Sarah Budhiman and Dylan Hooe uncovered the need for Pinch while preparing a meal for 12 classmates in the Wharton Food Club. When 30% of the shopping bill total was traced back to the spice aisle, they knew there was an opportunity to eliminate a key friction in the grocery marketplace.

How will your venture change the world?
Home cooking is a special and unifying experience often enjoyed with friends, family, and/or significant others. Pinch aims to create more of these moments, one meal at a time.

Fun Facts:
Sarah, Dylan, and Don are all passionate foodies. Their all-time favorite meals so far have been Omakase Sushi in Tokyo, Blue Crabs from the Chesapeake Bay, and Matumbo Stew in Nairobi respectively.

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

elevator pitch: VisiPlate is a nano-scale drainage implant to defend against blindness induced by open-angle glaucoma (OAG) by reducing intraocular pressure. It consists of a tube connected to a curved, ultrathin alumina nanoplate that is thinner, stronger, and more reliable than existing lines of defense.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
Our idea came from thinking of an application for the ultrathin plates provided in the 2017 Y-Prize Competition. We personally know people who suffer from open-angle glaucoma, and thought that this nanotechnology can effectively be used as an implant in the eye, where small variations in size can lead to large consequences.

How will your venture change the world?
VisiPlate will provide a life-changing product for patients with OAG, as it will prevent irreversible blindness in a long-term, cost-effective way. With glaucoma prevalence worldwide expected to reach nearly 80 million people within the next 3 years, we hope that VisiPlate will make a difference by protecting people’s vision all over the world.

Fun Facts:

Adarsh likes to make shirts

Rui Jing has The Halal Guys following her on Instagram

Brandon knows how to unicycle

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

Twine evolved from our side project, ClassmateMatch, which was a professional networking service to help people identify and meet the most relevant people in their organization. Our strategy was to sell this technology to large companies to build mentorship and networking programs.

As we started learning more about this problem, over and over again, HR leaders we spoke to complained about the broken state of internal recruiting. We’ve put our prototype in the hands of recruiters at our current corporate client, who have called it the future of internal hiring.

How will your venture change the world?

Companies are fighting a war to attract top talent, spending billions to recruit the best external hires. Yet every year, the average Fortune 500 company loses $100M in undesirable, preventable employee turnover. And employees, especially millennials, are leaving their jobs faster than ever.

Twine helps employees build careers that grow with, not out of, their companies. By bringing efficiency to internal job markets, Twine unlocks a tremendous amount of value for both companies and employees.

Fun Facts:

Joseph once met Travis Kalanick at a bar and asked him about Uber.

Nikhil once walked around the entire island of Manhattan (32 miles).

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

elevator pitch: Splaced is an innovative, online marketplace – the Airbnb of commercial space. We connect guests who need affordable, hourly, and on-demand spaces with hosting businesses who have unique but underutilized spaces.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
The idea for our venture came from Emily’s experiences as a Wharton student searching for a quiet, inspiring work spaces. Often, the available spaces were busy, noisy coffee shops or very expensive spaces catering to large groups. At the same time, from her work in the commercial real estate industry, Emily encountered many businesses whose high-rent spaces were unused for most of the business day. She recognized the opportunity for businesses to meet peoples’ space needs while recovering and monetizing the high cost of the business’ idle spaces.

How will your venture change the world?
Our venture will change the world by making more unique spaces available to the average person for living, working and collaborating. It will make the commercial real estate market more efficient and truly address pain points – affordable, hourly spaces for guests and maximum profitability for hosts.

Fun Facts:

Emily Smith is an encyclopedia of knowledge, who informed her parents when she was five years old that she wanted to work in real estate.

Ruchi Banka loves air activities. When she’s not serving as the calm negotiator that her “middle child” personality entails, Ruchi is out skydiving and hot air ballooning. Heads up!

Jake Kramer served in the U.S. Army. During his Army service, he was on their mixed martial arts (MMA) team, representing Colorado in the all-Army MMA tournament.

Dan Norelli loves beaches. On days when he’s not suited up as the director of financial planning and analysis at Trinity Real Estate, he is bumming out, we mean touristing, in charming Montauk, New York.

Matt Panas is an ardent admirer of the Oxford comma. It’s a small but significant aspect of his thorough, methodical thinking – a characteristic that he brings to analyzing people and problems.

Trang Pham is an avid mountain climber, who has scaled major summits in America, Europe, and Africa. Her fear of heights hasn’t stopped her from looking out at 20,000 feet above sea level.

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

elevator pitch: Slice Capital is democratizing Venture Capital, by allowing everyday individuals to invest in pre-vetted startups at the tap of a button. They’re challenging the way that people think about equity crowdfunding, through their breakthrough low-minimum, mobile-first platform.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
From an early age, Rohan has been investing in various asset classes, from stocks to commodities to even Bitcoin (which is how he’s been able to bootstrap the company to this point). He’s also been very active in the hackathon scene ever since sophomore year of high school, which originally brought him into the startup scene. Eager to invest in the early stage companies he read about, he looked for a platform to do so, to no avail… thus, Slice Capital was born and the team was assembled!

How will your venture change the world?
Slice Capital will help provide much needed capital to companies that need it most and will offer unprecedented access to this brand new asset class to everyone, rather than to just the top 1%. Currently, the other 99% has over $30T in banking and brokerage accounts. However, by giving non-accredited investors the opportunity to allocate just 1% of their assets to equity crowdfunding, Slice will push an additional $300B into the Venture Capital space. This is more than 10x the total amount of funding allocated by professional investors in all of last year. Slice’s unique platform will allow thousands of new investors to help fund companies that have the power to make a dramatic impact on our collective future.

Fun Facts:

Rohan played Young Prince Zuko in Avatar The Last Airbender when he was 14 years old.

Krish was the youngest PennApps Fellow and has very strong ties to the Philly tech scene, even though he’s from Colorado.

Jeff is one of four quadruplets.

Dan never wears shoes while in the office – he either goes barefoot or wears bunny slippers.

Christian can speak Spanish and Swahili and has been singing in both languages since 4th grade!

Michael only has nine toes.

Parker has perfect pitch.

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

elevator pitch: Severe COPD, popularly called emphysema, causes 2 million Americans to feel like they are suffocating every time they move around during the daily activities. RightAir creates a wearable device that relieves this terrible shortness of breath and allows COPD patients to engage in life again.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
In the Penn COPD clinic, most of our severe COPD patients constantly ask for any new treatment that will allow them to live their lives without the feeling of suffocation.

How will your venture change the world?
We will relieve the suffering of millions of Americans who feel like they are suffocating whenever they move around.

Fun Facts:

Thomas Uhler: My smooth baritone has led to many requests for me to cover Barry White’s classics.

Jacob Brenner, MD, PhD: Jake has done research on diseases affecting many different organs, including heart, brain, and even the anorectal canal.

Marek Swoboda, PhD: I was born and raised in Upper Silesia, a region of Poland that is largely German-speaking.

Perry Dubin, MD: My boyfriend is an actor on Broadway.

Michal Swoboda: My dad is also on this team, and working with him is actually really fun.

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!

elevator pitch: Ride Health aims to improve to care for patients who face transportation barriers. In leveraging the application programming interfaces (APIs) of ride-sharing companies, our software enables providers to request rides for patients and bill these rides to payers.

Where did the idea for your venture come from?
Our story began in an emergency department at a North Carolina hospital, where co-founder Imran Cronk was working as a volunteer. An elderly man had just been discharged on a rather large dose of medications. He seemed disoriented and did not have a ride home. He planned to walk around eight miles through the rain that night, but luckily, Imran drove the man to his house, safe and sound. This narrative rooted the motivation for Ride Health, and the business model itself sprung from a Wharton healthcare entrepreneurship class that Vedant and I took in the fall of 2015.

How will your venture change the world?
Our venture will revolutionize the lives of the 3.6 million Americans that miss their appointments due a lack of a ride. Ride Health represents the merger between a private innovation and a public need, and the tremendous role that technology will play in healthcare – especially in the integration of applications within the electronic medical records of patients. Ride Health will be a pioneer, and with it will come multiple other applications that improve care transitions and ultimately, improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes.

Fun Facts: Imran – I swing a tennis racket left-handed, but I bat right-handed; Vedant – I am a certified yoga instructor; Sumun – I have traveled to over 45 countries with my family.

Come to the Startup Showcase to see the best student entrepreneurs from across Penn demo their companies and compete for cash and prizes to launch their startups!